Joe vs. the Casino

Jennifer Coleman

Thursday, March 11, 1999 | 10:08 a.m.

CARSON CITY - Sen. Joe Neal took another swipe at the casino industry Thursday with an attempt to repeal a tax break on public displays of fine art.

The tax exemption was pushed through during the 1997 legislative session by casino mogul Steve Wynn, who furnished his Bellagio resort with over $300 million in fine art.

Neal, D-North Las Vegas, argued the tax exemption is costing the state nearly $18 million in lost tax revenue.

"In an area of tight budgets, it seems to me it'd be wrong to leave this exemption in law," Neal said.

Flanked by two works by Renoir, and eloquently lauding John Singer Sargent, Picasso and Monet, casino lobbyist Harvey Whittemore defended the tax break.

Whittemore said encouraging art collections in the "cultural wasteland" that was Las Vegas would greatly benefit the state.

"I can tell you with absolute certainty that the revenue generated from people coming in, seeing, participating in these displays - the net tax benefit to the state is bigger than any 'tax loss,"' he said.

But critics of the exemption called it an egregious display of corporate welfare benefitting Wynn's profits, not the public.

Taxation Chairman Mike McGinness, R-Fallon, said the committee would introduce a bill to clarify the tax exemption and the requirements to get it. No action was taken on SB90.

Though the tax break was approved two years ago, the state Tax Commission voted not to allow the exemption if Wynn charged admission to his collection of fine art at the Bellagio resort in Las Vegas.

Wynn is suing the Tax Commission over their interpretation of the law, which said the exhibit must be free to the public in order to be eligible for the exemption.

Wynn currently charges $10 admission.

Wynn, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, publicly started his art-buying binge in November 1996 with the $2.9 million purchase of Manet's "Portrait de Mademoiselle Suzette Lemaire, de profil."

Since then, he or his Mirage Resources Inc. have bought Cezanne's "Portrait of a Woman," Monet's "Water-Lily Pond with Bridge," Van Gogh's "Woman in a Blue Dress," and Degas' "Dancer Taking Her Bow."

He also has a Gauguin Tahitian scene, a Renoir of a girl and her mother by a riverbank, and works by Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and other major artists.